At a Glance
- Tasks: Own and optimise CI pipelines for cutting-edge software development.
- Company: Join OLIX, a pioneering tech company shaping the future of AI infrastructure.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, stock options, remote work flexibility, and retirement plans.
- Other info: Dynamic team environment with excellent growth opportunities and a focus on collaboration.
- Why this job: Be at the forefront of technology, making impactful contributions to innovative projects.
- Qualifications: Experience in CI/CD, build/test infrastructure, and strong programming skills required.
The predicted salary is between 80000 - 98000 £ per year.
About OLIX
AI is growing faster than any technology in history and the explosion in demand has created a massive infrastructure gap; we can no longer build chips or power stations fast enough to keep up. The industry is still leaning on a ten-year-old hardware blueprint that has reached its limit. A new paradigm that is faster and more efficient will be the biggest economic opportunity of the next century and create the most important company of the next decade. The OLIX Decode Accelerator 1 (DX-1) is the first accelerator architected specifically for decode. Rack-scale co-design of logic, data movement, packaging, optics and interconnect enables a step change in system level performance.
The Role
We're searching for a Staff/Senior Software DevOps Engineer to own the build, test, and CI flows that the entire DX-1 software stack, including the compiler, runtime, simulator, and framework integration, depends on. Ours is a large test suite that asserts token-exact correctness against golden references, and it has to run across scarce, expensive resources that span both simulation compute and hardware-in-the-loop testing, including simulator and emulator boxes alongside DX-1 and prototype-platform boards. Your mission is to keep that system fast, trustworthy, observable, and affordable as the test suite, the team, and the resource pool all grow. This is a build-and-test role, not product-serving SRE. You'll work where CI, the runner fleet, and the test hardware meet, partnering closely with the infrastructure, compiler, runtime, simulator, and modelling teams. At the Senior/Staff level, your impact is the velocity of every engineer who depends on this system: how fast they get a trustworthy signal, how rarely they wait on a machine or a flaky run, and how much they can self-serve without coming to you. That leverage, through the standards, platforms, and shared resource model others build on, is what we're hiring for far more than any single system you ship.
Responsibilities
- Own the Build & Test Pipelines: Design, build, and own CI pipelines and test execution across PR, merge, and nightly lanes that gate the entire software stack, balancing fast feedback with coverage and cost.
- Scale Test Execution: Split a large, slow suite into staged lanes, parallelize it with real test isolation, and cache aggressively using content-addressed keys so feedback stays fast and cost-effective as the suite and the team grow, rather than relying on simply adding more machines.
- Manage the Fleet & Scarce Resources: Run CI across a heterogeneous fleet of cloud and self-hosted machines, and give the team fair, monitored, fail-fast shared access to scarce and expensive hardware, keeping it reliable, well utilized, and never a silent bottleneck.
- Build the Performance & Readiness Signal: Stand up performance regression baselines the team trusts using pinned hardware, rolling baselines, sound metric aggregation, and deterministic testing. Turn CI and test signals into CI health and product readiness dashboards that drive real decisions.
- Own Software Observability: Choose the metrics store that scales to many time series across daily runs with long-lived history, making dashboards for observable software.
- Set Standards: Define the flows that keep builds and test runs hermetic and reproducible, and make the system fail closed while containing the blast radius when something is misconfigured or a job is untrusted.
Skills & Experience
- Experience in build/test infrastructure, CI/CD, developer productivity, or large-scale systems and release engineering, with demonstrated end-to-end ownership of a large test or CI system.
- Experience scaling a large test suite through staged lanes, parallelism with real isolation, content-addressed caching, and maintaining fast, cost-effective feedback as the suite grows.
- Experience managing heterogeneous CI runner fleets across cloud and on-prem environments, including VMs, containers, and bare-metal hardware.
- Ability to provide teams with shared, monitored access to scarce or expensive resources such as custom accelerators, FPGA/prototype rigs, lab hardware, or contended compute, including reservations, remote access, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and artifact portability across heterogeneous hosts.
- Experience supporting performance analysis with trustworthy regression baselines, deterministic testing, noise handling, sound metric aggregation (geometric mean, arithmetic mean, and median), and fast attribution and bisection.
- Experience building observability and metrics platforms, including CI health and product readiness dashboards, metrics stores that scale to long-lived, high-cardinality time series, and self-service access for engineers.
- Strong scripting and systems programming skills (for example, Python plus a systems language), along with proficiency in containers, Linux, and cloud infrastructure such as AWS.
- A reproducible, safe-by-default mindset, including hermetic builds, least privilege, fail-closed defaults, and blast radius control.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to align and influence cross-functional teams, including compiler, runtime, and modelling teams, without relying on formal authority.
- Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field.
Nice to Have
- GitHub Actions or comparable CI at scale; scaling CI runner fleets on cloud infrastructure (e.g. AWS); hardware-in-the-loop or lab automation for custom silicon or FPGA bring-up; time-series and observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, columnar warehouses).
- Adjacent depth is welcome: HPC / cluster batch scheduling, release engineering, or developer-productivity platforms.
Compensation & Equity
- Competitive Salary: Commensurate with your experience, skills, and location.
- Equity & Ownership: Meaningful stock options. You’re not just joining the mission; you’re owning a piece of it.
- Proximity Bonus: We value your time. To minimise your commute and maximise your life, we offer an annual Living-Local Bonus if your residence is within 20 minutes of the office.
- Retirement Benefits: Employer-contributed retirement plans to help you build long-term financial security.
Due to U.S. export control regulations, candidates’ eligibility to work at OLIX depends on their most recent citizenship or permanent residency status. We are generally unable to consider applicants whose most recent citizenship or permanent residence is in certain restricted countries (currently including Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Russia, Belarus, China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Venezuela). Applicants who have subsequently obtained citizenship or permanent residency in another country not subject to these restrictions may still be eligible.
Staff/Senior Software DevOps Engineer employer: Transition Ventures
At OLIX, we pride ourselves on being an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work culture that fosters innovation and collaboration in the heart of London. As an Infrastructure Manager, you'll have the opportunity to lead a talented team while enjoying competitive compensation, meaningful equity options, and a unique Living-Local Bonus to enhance your work-life balance. With a strong focus on employee growth and a commitment to building cutting-edge infrastructure, OLIX is the perfect place for those looking to make a significant impact in a rapidly evolving industry.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Staff/Senior Software DevOps Engineer
✨Join Local Tech Meetups
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✨Contribute to Open Source Projects
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We think you need these skills to ace Staff/Senior Software DevOps Engineer
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.
Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at Transition Ventures.
Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at Transition Ventures and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!
Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!
How to prepare for a job interview at Transition Ventures
✨Brush Up on Your Coding Skills
For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.
✨Know Your Tools and Frameworks
Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If Transition Ventures uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.
✨Showcase Your Projects
Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.
✨Prepare for Behavioural Questions
While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.